Jan Moons, UXprobe’s co-founder and UX expert, worked closely with Tim Van Lier (UX researcher at VRT, a Flemish public broadcasting corporation) to prepare and perform a series of remote and unmoderated user tests for the beta version of the VRT news website. In June 2017, they co-presented their results at the VRT Sandbox (click here to find out more about it). Today he will tell us more about this collaboration and what value UXprobe has brought for VRT.

 

I met Tim back in May at the VRT Sandbox, where we had a conversation and shared about the latest projects we were working on. As we spoke, he told me he was working on the redesign of the deredactie.be website and soon enough our chat spiralled into a discussion of us planning a proof of concept with the help of UXprobe.

Validating assumptions

Tim and I both felt that this would be perfect to help validate the assumptions that Tim and his team made in the ideation phase. It was also important to find out how they could optimise the design of their website to best fit their users.

 Download Case Study VRT Scaling User Testing

Large scale user tests in real-life context

Having performed various research methods during the project, Tim wanted to go ahead with user testing in the last phase of the project. However, he faced the common problem of every UX researcher: to perform user research on a large scale, to test in real-life context and to ensure that there is no interference from a moderator.

Tim was also able to find out what kind of paths users took and what users were most comfortable with from the observation of their behaviour on the website, as well as from their facial and aural expressions. It was nothing short of intriguing for Tim and his team to understand how actual users feel about the new website!

“It was liberating to see their honest reaction of their frustrations and hesitations, and the small details makes it so fun to watch and to learn about the users”. 

Results in a matter of days

In a few days, the video sessions were collected and they were especially helpful in showing the other stakeholders how real users struggled at certain areas of the website. This was highly encouraging for Tim, as he could now get them involved in the decision making for the design as he felt everyone could bring valuable contributions to the quality of the new website.

At the end of this user research, Tim and his team were happy with the responses collected from the user tests. Within a short span of time, Tim was able to bring forth valuable actionable insights such as to modify the toggle filter on the website to make it more user friendly. In addition to this, the findings created a clear path ahead for Tim and his team to go forth and make improvements to the UX of the website.  

“We are always looking for ways to scale up our user research to get more objective data, to also communicate it with our stakeholders, and to use it for our design solutions”.

 

With UXprobe, we were happy to help him overcome the difficulties of conducting large scale user tests and make UX research easier and more effective!

 

Want to find out more about the collaboration between VRT and UXprobe? Download our white paper now!

Download Case Study VRT Scaling User Testing

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jan Moons
UX expert & co-founder at UXprobe